Whaaat? A post??

I've been listening to (and analysing) Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. It's a surprisingly good album, and it's given me a renewed respect for Roger Waters (and Alan Parsons).

It's an interesting piece of work, mostly because of the depth of the themes it explores. It's pretty dark, when you look at it, living up to the title. The ideas it presents strike me as rather existentialist, though: Time seems to be an angst-ridden piece lashing out against the inevitability of old age and death. Breathe (Breathe in the Air) is less dismal, but carries a very existential message:

Long you live, and high you fly

Smiles you give and tears you cry

All you touch and all you see

Is all your life will ever be

I think this is a pretty nice summary of the concept of non-duality, one of the most central concepts to existentialism. Other themes in the album include the absurdity of money and a general lack of anything special in the world.

Of course, maybe I'm looking into it too deeply. It's not often that you see an album that's worth this sort of analysis, though.

From an auditory perspective, Dark Side of the Moon is absolutely brilliant. It's one of the first works to use sounds from real life in a musical context, and the juxtaposition against electronic sounds is intriguing. Time uses a flurry of chiming clocks in its intro, while Money uses the sounds of old-style manual cash registers to provide its beat. It's really heavy on instrumental parts, too, with most of the tracks going for over two minutes without any lyrics. The balance between the instruments and the singing is expertly done, giving it a similar feel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its notable deficit of dialogue.

Also neat is a recurring heartbeat motif, giving the album a sort of driving pulse of its own. You need something with good bass response to really notice it, though.

So, it's one of my favorite albums now. It's a classic, so you can get it on iTunes Plus for $10. Better yet, go down to your local swap meet and keep an eye out for the LP - since that's what it was originally mastered for, it has a different sort of character from the digital version. It was pretty popular in its time, so you can probably find it for just a buck. 

Now there's an interesting sight

It's no longer a project!

Sorry to disappoint, but I've been researching other options. Turns out that the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries do just about everything I've been proposing to do with IKKlib. As does Quartz/Cocoa. So what it comes down to:

EFL can be used on Linux, with great performance on handhelds

EFL can also be used on Windows

Quartz is fine for Mac OS X.

The only "problem" is that I'll have to get used to writing interface-agnostic programs. This isn't so bad, though, because SDL isn't all that elegant off of Linux. Heck, it's hardly elegant on Linux. Sorry, Sam.

It's a real project!

Hey everyone! Although my previous post here doesn't betray it, I've been thinking about doing a suite of programming libraries collectively known as IKKlib. A year ago, I would have questioned whether I would ever release anything, but now, not so much. I'm actually really close to publishing the source code for IKKlib/sprite, a very lightweight layer atop SDL for sprite programming.

IKKlib/sprite will probably end up duplicating many of the features in Kyra, but if I just used that, well, I wouldn't learn much about SDL programming, would I?

At any rate, it's meant to be small. So far it's under 200 lines of code, and I don't see it going anymore than double that. Until we get into portability, of course...

Spinning-off my geekery

Unfortunately I don't have the willpower to totally cut off my technological ramblings, but I can at least keep them somewhere well away from all the other stuff.

Today's topic is, once again, audio encoding. Hey, I run into it all the time with my iPod/Zaurus. It's something I tend to think about.

There's basically two new contenders in the encoding world for me: lame and faac. My opinion of lame is actually pretty high, but unfortunately it still falls short of the mark. It's the best MP3 encoder I've encountered, but at 128kbps it sounds... wrong. On some tracks (especially string instruments) I hear a good deal of squealing, and on just about everything there's a sort of "wobble". Vibrato. Faint, but present. Vorbis gets the same sort of wobble, but at 64kbps, so lame loses.

But we are, however, stuck to formats the iPod can handle, and this is where faac comes in. There's still something wrong with AAC, but I can't put my finger on it yet. Pehaps someday there will be a digital media player that plays Vorbis, has gapless playback, and is the size of a pack of gum...